Tropic of Creation (3 page)

Eli looked at Mrs. Olander, wondering how much she could know of
ruin
.

She gave him a twisted smile, eyes making contact. “I know what you think of me, Captain. That I throw my weight around.” The smile broadened at his discomfort. “You must think so. Even I do sometimes.” She gazed off in the direction of her daughter and husband up on the rise. “You must wonder why I fret over Sascha—why I don’t just let her muck in the dirt, let her study biology.”

Eli knew that biology was no avocation for a lady. He’d learned that much cooped up with Cristin Olander on the three-month junket from Keller’s star.

She continued, “It’s because my general father won’t permit it.” She gave him another twist of her lips, a surrogate smile. “You think people like us can do what we will, but you don’t know a thing.”

Before she could unburden her privileged woes any further, he said, “I have the responsibility to investigate that ship, Mrs. Olander. The careers of 112 officers and enlisteds are on the line.” When she had the grace to remain silent, he added, more softly, “Perhaps you could send your paper on ahead.”

“With radio out?”

“We’ll be outbound in a few days. Send it then?”

They held each other’s gaze. Finally Cristin nodded, saying, “Fine,” in a tone that made it clear it wasn’t. She glanced out at the ridge. Sascha was disappearing down its far flank. “Maybe you could talk to her, Captain. She’ll listen to you. She likes you.”

It offered a quick exit. “If it will help.” He excused himself and walked away from her, up the wadi, in the direction of the youngster who was gathering fossils and freckles, ruining her nails and her pretty alpha skin.

A shadow skittered over the plain, just missing Eli. Above, a cumulus cloud sailed in a massive, bleached globule, carrying its load of moisture far out of reach. The other side of the planet must sprout these things, Eli thought. In that great shallow ocean, animal life, marine
life, might flourish. Given half a chance, Geoff Olander would be wading in that shallow sea right now, prodding at mats of algae, sampling pillows of bacteria, with something close to rapture.

Given the hand Geoff Olander was dealt on this temporary stop, the parched fossils of this hemisphere would have to do.

Eli found Geoff and his daughter in a deep, wind-scoured ravine revealing slabs of crumbling stone and, in the near distance, the hump of another hexadron, half caved-in with age. Geoff waved to Eli—a brief, cheery hello—and bent over his work once more. Sascha held a sack half her size, the satchel of their finds.

“How’s pickings?” Eli asked Sascha.

“We have five bags of specimens,” she said. “Great definition, full body skeletals.” She rummaged in the satchel for an example.

Geoff shaded his eyes, looking up at Eli, with the same piercing blue eyes as his daughter. “Not reining us in, I hope?”

“Might be best if you stayed in camp,” Eli said. “A precaution.”
Against what? Against the social taboos of an overprotective mother?
But he let Geoff draw his own conclusions.

The man looked down the ravine with longing. “Best site we’ve found so far.” He tapped at a slab of rock with his small hammer, sloughing off a crumbling layer of mud. Then he sighed and stood up. “Couldn’t you give us a few hours?”

Feeling Sascha’s eyes burn a hole in his back, Eli said, “As soon as you can, then.”

Geoff snorted, but said civilly enough, “Caught between two Olanders, eh?”

Eli was saved from answering by Sascha sidling between them, shoving a transparent specimen bag into Eli’s hand. It contained the remains of a small creature, a
jumble of dust and bones. “Nice fossil,” Eli said, playing the dolt, goading Sascha the way she seemed to love.

“It’s not a fossil. It’s a skeleton. Real bones. We found the whole skeleton together, and it looked rather like a frog, except for spinules on the back.” She traced the long spinules with her index finger. “I found it, so I might get to name it. Something
olanderi
. Or, I could immortalize
you
, Captain. I could make this one something
dammondi
. If you were nice and gave us an extra day to make scientific history.”

Geoff raised an eyebrow, daring Eli to deny her.

Eli found himself smiling. “I’ll take your request under advisement.”

“Kiss of death,” Sascha declared, gently placing the bag in her satchel like a fine piece of porcelain.

“A lot of bones here, then, Mr. Olander?” Eli saw for himself that the ravine was littered with them.

“Yes, a world of them. A biologist’s dream.”

“Then the place had life once,” Eli said, meaning the bones, but looking at the hexadron.

“Still does, somewhere, I expect. Drought’s driven them off.” Geoff twisted a bone fragment in his hand, a narrow span with an odd socket joint.

Eli knew it was more than an odd bone to Geoff—it was the chance to pierce a mystery or leave it forever buried. But he saw it in Geoff Olander’s eyes more than in the bones.

“We’ll never come back here,” Geoff said softly. No challenge to Eli’s authority.

“I doubt it.” The planet was so far off the service routes that the
Lucia
was lucky to have found Marzano and her crew at all.

Geoff sighed at the waste. “Five, six billion years of life—and all we have is what’s in those sacks. I’d almost stay behind, you know?”

Eli knew. Knew that urge to bend the rules when they needed bending.

Nearly overhead now, the yellow sun lapped up the very shadows at his feet, wrung sweat from his hairline. Down the ravine, the ancient hexadron still had a metal glint beneath the baked-on dust. He gazed at the thing, his mind looking for ways to bend the rules.…

Noting his gaze, Sascha asked, “What about the underground cave, Captain?” He was marshaling his arguments.
If there are ahtra down there, it will take an officer to handle the encounter; its a political matter, not a firefight…
but the justification could come later.
The longer you think, the worse your decision
, went the army adage.

The chance of a lifetime rang in his ears. After a beat, Eli answered, making up his mind. “I’ll be going down.”

“Can I come with you?”

“No place for a lady,” he said, straight-faced.

She regarded him with an icy stare. “Will you bring Captain Marzano with you?”

“I expect not.”

That seemed to mollify Sascha, who monitored the doling out of adventures with great acuity.

Eli picked Sascha’s hat off the rock where she’d discarded it and handed it to her. “Mrs. Olander will be happier with me if you wear this. Help me win some points?”

Sascha sighed and donned the hat, a world-weary expression flitting across her face.

Geoff Olander nodded in the direction of the next wadi. “Think there’s something down there, then?”

I hope so
, sprang to Eli’s mind. It was a Dammond brother’s response. Always a nose for trouble, drawn to the action. Sometimes the action was more than they bargained for. Now three of his four brothers were dead, killed in the war—the real war, Eli’s father said, not the elite officer’s war, cushioned by command, out of the fray.

Once, coming back from officer candidate school, Eli and his father had duked it out over whether Eli thought he was too good for enlisted rank. Neither could remember
who swung first, but they both landed some hard blows. Later, spent and gasping, they washed up together and sat down to dinner at the big family table. Nobody said a word about their bruises, swelling like bread dough.

Geoff was still waiting for his answer.

“Only one way to find out,” Eli finally said.

From the distance came the grinding shudder of the hexadron, having another go at the hard pan floor of the wadi.

S
ascha Olander and her parents had a deluxe tent, officer-quality issue straight off the newly arrived
Lucia
. Nearby, Captain Marzano’s tent sagged from three years of peeling-hot sun. Geoff Olander had offered their tent to Marzano. But she had declined, as she should.

In the middle of that spacious tent, Sascha sat on a chair as her mother rewove her braid in front of the silver-edged mirror that she’d hung from the tent pole.

Sascha pursued her point, though her mother was weary of the topic: “Why do you hate him so?”

“I don’t hate him.” Cristin pulled the braid so tight Sascha’s temples ached.

“Despise him, then.”

“I neither despise nor hate him, dear. I seldom regard him at all.” She secured the braid with a band, frowning at the wisps that sprang loose.

“That’s so … dismissive,” Sascha returned with some heat. “You’re just like all the rest.”

Her father looked up from his worktable, catching Sascha’s eye, conveying his rebuke.

For his sake, Sascha toned it down a notch. “We’re friends, Mother. I just want to watch him go into the mine. Or whatever it is.”

“It’s a military matter. You’ll just be in the way.” Cristin checked her own hair in the mirror, the short-cropped, stylish cut of a woman graduated from girlish braids.

Sascha needed a deep, cooling breath, but when she inhaled, all she got was a chest full of Null’s hot, yeasty air.

From the shadows in back her father’s voice came. “It may not hurt, Cristin. I’ll go with her.”

Cristin turned on her husband with ferocity. “You always give in. Each little thing just encourages her. You don’t remember what it’s like, the obligations she’ll have. She’s nearly grown, Geoff.”

“Then, for God’s sake, let her have a few more days of childhood.”

Sascha could see the fire stoked in her mother’s eyes. “You think that’s going to make it easier on her? You don’t
see
do you? Already in camp she’s got an
enlisted
friend …”

“It’s only electronic chess, Mother,” Sascha interrupted.

Cristin rolled on past, still locked on the enemy, her husband. “…  with a vocabulary that could singe metal, and hair that looks like it
did.”

“Nevertheless,” Geoff said, attempting a neutral end, to salvage a truce.

“That’s regen hair, and Nazim’s lucky she’s got
any,”
Sascha mumbled, invisible—and oddly beside the point—to the dueling adults.

Cristin looked at her husband a few beats. Finally, all she said was “She can’t take no for an answer, God help her.”

Geoff continued in the usual way, which was to give the verbal win to Cristin and then do what he chose. “This
will only take an hour. Then she’s yours for the day.” He stood up to make his intention clear.

Mother hated to lose these contests. Suppressing the delight on her face, Sascha offered, “I’ll study differentials when I get back.”

Cristin waved her hand in tired dismissal.

Sascha headed for the tent door. Her father opened the flap. “Hat,” he said, donning his own.

She dashed back, swiping her hat from the table. Too late, Cristin caught her gaze. “Be careful who you pick for heroes, Sascha.”

“What do you care who my heroes are?” Then she regretted saying it, knowing it could refer to her preference for her father over her mother, for biology over math, and she tried so hard not to fuel that rivalry, and not to force any edicts over whether she should study a man’s science or a lady’s.

“I care,” Cristin Olander said.

Feeling guilty now, Sascha backed away, toward the flap door. “I’ll be back.”

She thought she heard her mother say, barely audible, “I doubt that.”

Sascha burst into the bright wall of light just outside. Her father raised his eyebrows, she raised her own, and off they set for the hexadron.

They passed the rows of tents, and the wood huts that supplemented Marzano’s military-issue hutches. Salted in among the tattered quarters were Captain Dammond’s crisp new igloo-style tents. These were the quarters of those soldiers with whom she’d shared three months’ berth, and who therefore had had time to hate her.
Privilege
, their eyes said when they looked at her.
Money. General’s whelp
. Some of the enlisteds were cleaning weapons, sitting in the last of the morning shade.

All the long way from Keller’s star—Congress World Four—she got a double dose of education. The formal
one, in math and manners from her mother, who finally had her daughter entirely under her thumb at close quarters; and the informal one, learned from the ranks of the enlisteds, on envy and the art of despising, even over such a small thing as the Olanders having a ship berth large enough for ten enlisteds and taking their meals with the officers.

Thus it was that when assigned to the
Lucia
for transport to their new post—and seeing how the soldiers sneered at Captain Dammond behind his back, Sascha came to take his side. Whoever the enlisteds hated was someone very like herself.

To catch the meager shade, she and her father walked along the edge of the Sticks, those tall spines of wood that sprouted like quills from the land, and which inspired her father to dub this the Gray Spiny Forest. Of the two camps established by Captain Marzano, Sascha and her parents were assigned to Charlie Camp, where the water requirements of ninety-four people engaged a harvesting operation covering two square miles of the Sticks. Baker Camp, established far enough away to assure its own water supply, exploited the eastern stick cisterns.